Decluttering for the New Year

The Junkluggers, “the Robin Hood of furniture removal,” aim to ﬁnd new homes for all your unwanted junk.

This is the year you swear you are going to eat less saturated fat, learn Latin, enjoy life to the fullest, blah blah blah. Chances are you will do none of the above. But if your to-do list includes getting rid of your old stuff to make room for new stuff, help is on the way. One morning not long ago, Mike Cardona and Darryl Bradley, both thirty-three and dressed in black T-shirts, cargo pants, and baseball caps, showed up at a one-bedroom apartment near Sutton Place to pick up a sleep sofa, love seat, sideboard, and ottoman. The two men are employees of the Junkluggers, “the Robin Hood of furniture removal,” Zach Cohen, the twenty-nine-year-old owner of its New York City franchise, said the other day, in his Long Island City office. “We’re passionate about donation.” Cohen added that he was an accountant until he realized he wasn’t passionate about taxes. Junkluggers, which aims to find new homes for all your unwanted junk (for a non-trivial fee of between two hundred and a thousand dollars, plus tax), was founded by Zach’s brother, Josh, in 2004, after an elderly neighbor in Fairfield County, Connecticut, offered to pay him a hundred dollars to get rid of a couch. In those days, the Dodge Durango that Josh and Zach borrowed from their mother played a central role. Today, the company operates in ten states, takes in eight million dollars annually, and owns a fleet of gleaming chartreuse trucks.

Cardona and Bradley’s first schlep of the day was an easy one: no stairs, no pianos (hard to give away), no dead cats (harder) or human skulls (a pair discovered by Luggers cleaning out the home of a deceased man one Halloween were bequeathed to the police). Two sisters were disposing of their old living-room furniture to make room for a new set being delivered that afternoon. Their father, supervising the goings and comings while his daughters were at work, said that he had called the Salvation Army for a pickup, but they’d detected a scratch on one of the sofa legs, and the deal was off. “I told them, ‘I’m giving it to you for nothing. You got to be kidding me!’ ”

“The Salvation Army has this attitude,” Cardona said as he and Bradley maneuvered the sofa through the front door. “Except the one on Twenty-third Street, which is run by a very nice woman.”

Later that day, Angela Kelly, the nice woman who manages the Twenty-third Street Salvation Army thrift shop, welcomed the gray Ultrasuede sleep sofa, overlooking the scratch but giving the mattress a once-over (many organizations will not accept mattresses for bedbug and ick reasons). “Y’all got to put those legs back on,” she told Cardona and Bradley as they lifted the piece off the truck. “I don’t have man help today.” The sisters would be sent a tax-deductible receipt.

Have Cardona and Bradley ever brought home swag acquired on the job? “We aren’t allowed to keep something unless the customer gives us permission,” Cardona said, explaining that a Lugger must offer an item to three charities before dropping it off at headquarters. Cardona counts among his favorite freebies a table made from a tree trunk and a violin. Bradley once nabbed a frozen-smoothie-maker and a Pink Floyd boogie board. Last year, he was named Lugger of the Year, an award based partly on the number of donations secured. The honor comes with a Verizon tablet.

On the way to job No. 2—a pied-à-terre on the Upper West Side—Bradley recounted how, a few days earlier, he and a colleague had mistakenly taken a statue from a large apartment in midtown and donated it to a church. Fortunately, when the mixup was discovered, the piece had not yet been sold. “That statue had to be seventy-five pounds. It was awesome,” he said. “Did you ever hear of Remington? ‘The Bronco Buster’?”

Last collection of the day: a downtown penthouse loft where a few trees, some ceramic planters, and ten garbage bags of dirt needed to be removed from a rooftop patio. “Some people will look at this job as just hauling junk,” Bradley said as he drove down Varick Street. “But we’re so much more than that.” ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the January 9, 2017, issue, with the headline “Out with the Old.”